Body Shame.
It was a balmy and humid morning Saturday. BB and I went out for 19 miles. As I tweeted the night before, we are now deeply into the reasonably-long-drive-length runs. We only have one run longer, a 21 miler in three weeks, before the marathon. This weekend we’re running the Navy/Air Force Half-marathon in Washington DC. It’ll be nice to have to run “only” thirteen miles for our long run this week.
I’m really looking forward to the race. It looks like a good course, starts and ends at the Washington Monument. It’ll cover some of the same ground as our full marathon next month, so it will be good to see how the terrain feels. And I’ll get another medal and I’ll get to run with my partner and I’m excited for all those things. It’ll be kind of nice to go out for a two hour run without wearing a vest and hauling six pounds of stuff on my back too. Running unencumbered is a nice change from all the junk I’ve got to carry on the long training runs.
The weather is supposed to be getting better too. During our 19 miler, the average temp was about 75 degF. And it was about 85% humidity. I sweat a lot. Despite drinking almost three liters of water, I lost about five pounds of water-weight during the run. Which works out to about 11 pounds of sweat. I’m drenched from mile four onward, and my footsteps squish from mile six. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just a person for whom exertion equals perspiration. It’s not attractive.
But with cooler temps I sweat less, and with lower humidity it evaporates faster. Which cools me too. And I end up less of a disgusting, drippy slob. It’s nicer. But even in the deep depths of winter, running in sub-freezing temperatures, I end up wet with sweat.
Sometimes I wonder: would I be less ashamed of my body if I had a better one? Or would I simply focus on smaller supposed flaws? I was a scrawny kid. I didn’t get fat until I was in my late teens. I was never tremendously obese, but at 235 pounds, I was a hefty guy. Now down some 50 pounds, I look reasonably fit with a suit on. But I still have a pronounced spare tire that’s very visible in running clothes when they’re plastered to me with sweat. Even if I lose ten or fifteen more pounds, my skin will never snap back to what it would look like if I’d never gained all that weight.
I’m healthy, these days. My metabolic numbers are good. My strength is decent. I can run at least three and a half hours without stopping. But I’m ashamed of my body. Even while I’m proud of what it can do, I’m ashamed of how I look. And I’m past the point where it is possible for me to look how I want to. I simply need to practice acceptance.
Accept what I cannot change. Change what I can. I can do the things I want to do. I am healthy and strong and committed to doing good things for my body. That it will never look how I want it to look is a simple fact. I can accept that. I will be able to accept that. One day.
Guest Infact: A Meditation on Race, Privilege, and Reggae.
My sister sent this to me, about her lifelong journey on understanding race and privilege. Now, married to an African-American and having two children who face challenges growing up that she didn’t, that perspective continues to evolve. We have different memories of our childhoods, but I’m always glad to gain from my little sister’s wisdom. She approaches the world very differently from the way I do, but we usually arrive at similar destinations, morally.
At about 13yo I found my best spiritual teacher, reggae music. The first song I heard was Bob Marley’s Kaya. I didn’t know kaya was herb, I didn’t smoke it yet, either….I assumed from the context of the song that kaya meant Faith. And I loved it…in my bones. Faith was the thing missing in my religion (or so I felt then).
It was playing in Uncle David’s fun shop in Occidental California (don’t even remember what I was doing in california, too much Kaya in the days since…)I was so visibly moved that the shop owner, uncle David himself, gave me the tape.I had read about reggae in relation to Rastafarianism…but the first time I heard it was…no, there aren’t words for what it was… Its not just music…it’s a history lesson and a moral code and something holy…all set to a beat that struck my soul instantly. I didn’t know why, I didn’t know a single Jamaican or rastafarian, it felt a little inauthentic, but I couldn’t deny its influence on me….Then maybe a year or so later I heard the Melodians singing Rivers of Babylon for the first time….that’s about MY People My ancestors…the Jews were the ones stolen from Zion to work as slaves in Babylon….the line “let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord” that’s a Jewish prayer…I felt it as an invitation to learn and grow through reggae… authentically, as me, a white Jewish girl.
It was the first time I really felt or thought of Judaism as a religion rather than just a culture. Being Jewish is not straightforward, it’s a religion, but you don’t have to believe anything to be a member…. it isn’t typically deeply spiritual..unless you’re Hasidic or study kaballah. Reform Judaism is sort of more political and cultural than spiritual or religious…..I was raised culturally Jewish, as a secular Jew.
But we worshipped education, not God. In my family, being a good Jew had more to do with going to a good university than it did with going to synagogue. My mom graduated from Columbia University at 19, is “all but dissertation” in one discipline and has a PhD in another. Just getting a PhD is for stupid people. I rebelled against an ivy league education the way lots of little Christians rebel against Jesus. I got expelled from high school 3 times…(boarding school, because I got expelled from home first) I ruined my shot at Columbia, where damn near everyone in my family went to school. A poor choice in retrospect, clearly. I’m even stupider than the folks with a single doctorate.
I was raised to believe that “religion” is an easy way out…that the meaningful path to god is the one you create, that a “bright and morally sound man doesn’t need religion any more than a man with two good legs needs crutches”..I don’t personally believe that…I love religion….all of them…I can’t think of a “wrong” one…I’ve always been thirsty for God in the way that preschoolers are thirsty to learn to read….they know it’s a code…they just can’t crack it…..but they are fully aware that it will open up the whole world when they do….
My mom encouraged me to learn as much as I could about as many religions as I could….and to pick and choose whatever felt like it fit for me, to find my own spiritual path….I approached it like any good Jew….with books…I read about different religions, every book I could get my hands on. That’s how I learned about Rastafarianism, and even without reggae, it was in inspiring religion to learn about, based on Marcus Garvey’s “back to Africa” movement…
But let me go back a bit…
When I first learned about slavery, maybe 2nd grade, a couple of years after my dad married my African-American step mom, who to this day I’ve only been able to talk to about race maybe 5 times, she just can’t, or hates to, or something….they’ve been married for 30yrs now…. Anyway…after that day, I came home from school with an intense case of miniature liberal white guilt….my mom…having a hard time seeing her child hurting said the easiest thing she could think of that was likely to make me feel better….”we’re jewish, honey, our people have been slaves too.” Sweet. Black people and Jews share a history of oppression. I’m not the bad guy.
That honestly worked to absolve me of my early childhood liberal white guilt, got me through elementary school….until it was impossible to ignore that being Jewish didn’t exclude me from white privilege. The exsistance of white privilege, and my clear benefit from it made me feel like shit….but how do you reject it?? I did what any silly ignorant well meaning 17yo girl that loved reggae would do…..I got dreadlocks. That made people treat me differently. It excluded me from privilege pretty effectively, because it is such a clear rejection of mainstream beauty standards for a pretty young lady…and people hate that.
That kinda worked in whatever misguided way I needed it to…I felt relatively justified in having locks…because I was a pot smoker, I loved reggae, deeply, soulfully…and hey, um, I had black friends, even family….but I’m not a Rastafarian. It’s undoubtedly been the biggest influence on the formation of my spirituality, and reggae continues to be my best guide…but there are huge core principles I simply don’t believe. That’s my problem with most religions…that’s why I pick and choose what works for me from several rather than subscribing to one.
When I was 20 I went to Barbados… (my older brother took me as an apology for my childhood…he was awful)
Barbados was amazing, in so many ways…how it created a friendship between my brother and me…the helicopter ride, the monkeys the music…..The BEST thing I got there, was a painfully humbling conversation that forever changed me. The man was beautiful, and kind and bright, and had locks past his ass…I assumed he came over to me in the bar to flirt, and was thanking my lucky stars….but that wasn’t it…I was a white girl with dreadlocks and he had questions…. lots… and good ones. I thought hard and answered all of them, fairly well… I thought…. and then he very gently explained to me how offensive I was….very gently, because he really understood that it wasn’t my intention…. He explained how offensive it was to have dreadlocks when I was neither a Rastafarian nor black. How offensive it was that I would throw away my privilege, what he wouldn’t do for some fucking privilege….I understood from him that I wasting the fact that I was born on 3rd base, wasting opportunities or weakening my voice in the world sure as shit didn’t make me more like him. And didn’t make me understand his experience in the world any better.
He said to own it, use it, be myself, and use every bit of privilege I could scrounge up, use for good, for upfulness, for sharing overstanding (that’s what Rastas say instead of undertanding…makes so much more sense)
Its been almost 20yrs since then…I’ve had a lot of humbling experiences regarding race and culture…trust me you don’t know white guilt until you’ve wished your white privilege extended to your brown children…you don’t know what humility is until you realize that even with all the privilege than money, race and education can provide you still can’t make a difference for your kids. The impotence of oppression sucks, no one would choose it.
There were many important lessons that night…cultural appropriation and why it’s really not that cool….using my privilege rather than trying to reject it as if I could make it not exist, all by my silly hippy self (what a privileged idea, Jesus Christ) …the still burning humility…..but the best lesson was to allow myself to have uncomfortable humble conversations with people of different races and/or cultures….and I learned that that’s the only way to learn what other people’s experiences are like…you have to actually listen to them. That is the ONLY path to cultural sensitivity. You can’t manufacture the experience of walking in someone else’s shoes. Nor can You assume you know it from hanging out with people if you don’t talk about it….Sorry, but that black friend you have doesn’t automatically mean you’re cultured and culturally sensitive. I had lots of black friends back then, even a black step mom….but you can’t learn through proximity alone..I don’t think a single one of our white friends has ever asked my husband why he wraps his hair, but they ALL ask me…why whisper the question to his white wife? And no, I’m not gonna tell you here, ask him, he’s not scary… Have more uncomfortable conversations…be willing to grow…I couldn’t have heard that man the way I did if he had treated me as if I were being offensive on purpose…I would have simply figured he didn’t understand that I wasn’t like that….that I wasn’t racist or culturally insensitive…he was just judging me because I was white, (obviously I was cultured….I had black friends)……but instead he showed me how racism can exist without racists…(there’s a book with that title…it’s excellent) because he got that I was ignorant, but humble….and not stupid enough to choose to stay ignorant If there was a choice. If you’re willing to have enough uncomfortable conversations, they get less uncomfortable eventually. It’s worth the effort.
I cut my hair when I got home from Barbados. But Reggae will always be my spiritual guide. Not my only one, not by a long shot, but it’s my best one, and it’s the only spiritual teacher I can listen to every day. It’s my daily practice. But you can trust you won’t see me with dreadlocks again. Or speaking patois, no matter how many hours I spend with Jamaicans in basement recording studios. I will always be the Jewish white girl, with reggae in my bones.
Beginning the Fall Right.
Well, another weekend, and another personal distance record. These are going to become commonplace over the next two months. On Saturday, BB and I ran 18.1 miles. It took us about 3 hours and 20 minutes. That’s an 11 minute per mile pace. I actually wish that were a bit faster. We’re looking at nearly a five hour marathon at that speed. And we’d have eight more miles to go while keeping up that pace. It’s going to be hard.
But a few things are working in our favor. First, we have about six weeks left to get fitter. We’re working hard at it. The cross training is crucial to building cardiovascular capacity, and the strength training helps with core-fitness and supplemental muscles which reduce the risk of injury and can function to support the major muscle groups when they get fatigued. And working in crosstraining allows the big running muscles to rest without sacrificing fitness-building effort the way a total rest day does.
Sunday was a fun day of general activity. While BB did her grueling weight routine, I swam 1000 yards in the pool (about 0.58 miles) and then did about half an hour of strength training myself. After that we did a slow, waddling 3.2 mile recovery run. And then later in the afternoon we went on a 12 mile bike ride. So, in my case, I did the equivalent of a sprint triathlon, which would have taken me about 2 hours.
Returning to work Tuesday morning, I discover that I have had a small paper accepted to a well-known but non-glamorous medical journal. I’m very pleased. It’s been about 8 months of on-again, off-again work to get it out there. We sent it to a more glamorous journal first, and got a very tentative revise and resubmit, but they were unhappy with our revision. Now, we’ve managed to get it into a perfectly respectable journal which has published me before.
So it’s not a bad way to start the fall. I’m wearing a new jacket. I’ve just had a paper accepted. I had an excellent recreational weekend. And I’m a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Feels pretty good.
What the Marathon Means to Me.
We have passed the halfway point in both miles and time. Below is my 16 week marathon training schedule I laid out. I based it reasonably closely on schedules I’d seen online, with a few of my own tweaks. Because we’re training for a finish, not a time, I didn’t feel the need to put in a lot of complicated workouts (I don’t like them, anyway) and I didn’t feel the need to put in a huge number of miles. The goal is simply to get my feet around 26.2 miles. I’d say that so far we’re succeeding.
As you can see, I haven’t adhered perfectly to the schedule, but I’ve been pretty darned good. BB’s grid would look a little different, because she was in Iceland, and we haven’t always deviated from the schedule in the same way. But mostly, both of us have been very faithful to the plan. My cross training during this time has included a bunch of gym/strength/weight training, and about 200 miles on my bike. BB’s is mostly around a crossfit-type class she does, and a brutal strength/weight program she has from an app she uses.
What I’ve learned so far about this is that training for a marathon, once a certain base-level of fitness has been acquired, is about mental discipline. Some days I don’t want to run. Some days I don’t want to train. I’m not exactly tired, I’m not injured. I’m just emotionally fatigued with it. And I go run. Because I have to if I want to achieve the goal I set out to. And once I’ve run, I feel better. But being disciplined requires, well, discipline. It’s less about actually doing the runs, and more about the choices I make.
For example, I have a friend who’s moving to the West Coast. It’ll be a lot harder to see him soon. He asked me to hang out in New York with him for a weekend in September. I had to say no. I have to run. I don’t have the bandwidth to do all the work I need to do to achieve this and also go do that prior to the marathon. I know some people will think that’s an indefensible decision. But that’s the choice I made eight months ago when I decided to run a marathon.
This marathon isn’t a fitness goal, or a running goal. It isn’t a hobby. It’s a marker of achievement for my life that I’ve elected to undertake. It’s something that I want to accomplish to represent an emergence from a life of addiction and misery. It’s an attempt to ensure a healthy life free from the devastating complications of chronic illnesses that have stricken my family. It’s an investment in my relationship and my intimacy with my partner. It’s a challenge I set for myself to signify that I am capable of high achievement.
It’s something that helps me tell myself, I am a man in the world. Someone who does difficult things. Someone who works hard and makes progress. Someone who isn’t afraid to overcome pain and risk failure to succeed. This is my goal. This is my pain. This is my life. Here I am. Take another step. Don’t stop until the end. And then celebrate.
Interviewing Candidates is a Matter of Justice.
I am now deep into the hiring process for my position here at MECMC. This is the first time that I’ve been in a position to offer variable compensation for a job. That is, I get to decide (within bounds) what the person working for me is going to earn. the few times I’ve hired student interns for pay, I suppose that’s been basically true, but it’s been at the level of, “I have $2000, please give me 10 hours a week for 12 weeks.” Now, I’m hiring for a position where I’m going to be presumably furnishing a person’s entire livelihood.
That means I have some incentives. Currently, I don’t have autonomous budgetary control. Meaning, my department head is the one who has signing authority for what a person is going to make, but we’re working on establishing my own budget for my own activities and reports, and that means that however much I pay someone is less money for my laboratory. My budget will have to cover software, supplies, travel, publications, etc., in addition to personnel. So if I pay someone $5,000 more, that’s a conference we can’t go to.
As this is my first time hiring, and I’ve only gotten to the point where I’ve found a couple of candidates worth interviewing, hereafter we are in the realm of anecdote, rather than evidence. But my anecdote seems to align cleanly with the evidence I’ve been informed of regarding the differences in men’s and women’s salary requests.
Candidate X is male, qualified, confident, and represents himself well. He asked for a salary right in line with what I am expecting to offer. His upper end is a little toward my high side, his lower end a little toward my low side. If I make him an offer, I’ll offer just above his floor and give him room to negotiate. Candidate Y is female, qualified, and comes across as tentative but professional. She asked for a salary more than $25,000 less than my absolute floor, set by my institution, for the minimum I’m allowed to offer.
Whether or not I end up offering her the job, I’m going to tell her that when interviewing for jobs like this one, she needs to double her asking price. There’s a lot of research around why women tend to make less than men for the same job. While the gap between men’s and women’s salaries for the same job and same qualifications has narrowed considerably in the past decades, it persists. One reason (among many) is that women tend to ask for much less money.
Given the incentives that any employer has, it’s hard to say that employers should pay people more than they ask for, as a general rule. But that’s sort of what employers do: hiring men at higher salaries than women who are equally qualified but ask for less money. Which is kind of perplexing to me. From a strictly financial point of view, shouldn’t the employer hire the woman at a low wage rather than the man at the higher one? It’s really easy to find equally qualified men and women these days. If the women are less costly, why not go with an all-female workforce?
Then there’s the issue that I work for a wealthy, prestigious institution. While my own department’s budget is strict, I see no reason to fight for the lowest possible salary in a new hire. MECMC will be just fine; we’re not a small business struggling to make ends meet. I don’t mind taking a little bit less in the way of conference and publication money if it means that I can pay my people well. And I don’t doubt my ability to advocate for conference and publication funds from my institution when they see the value I bring for them.
So, I’m still in the interview process. But I feel that justice demands I let this young woman know that she’s severely compromising her future earnings by setting such a low floor for herself. She’s undervaluing her ability to contribute. I hope that doesn’t make me just another man with (some) power telling a woman what to do.
I’m Mediocre. And Damned Proud of It.
This weekend was a strange one for our marathon training. This would have been a weekend for our 17 mile run, but because we had a 10K race on Sunday, we only did a 10 mile long run Saturday. Here’s what I’ve learned about the long run: much like a vacation, it doesn’t really matter how long it really is. It matters how long you mentally prepare for it to be. Ten miles were plenty to get me ready to stop running. Even though I am usually flying along pretty well at the 10 mile mark. But recovery was quicker.
Then I bought a Garmin forerunner 225. I’m pretty sure it was a terrible mistake. The watch itself seems pretty ok, except that it measured a 1.7 mile walk as 46 calories, which is ludicrous. It should be a minimum of 140, probably more like 170. And if it doesn’t calculate calories correctly, it’s not worth anything. But worse was the fact that the website interface is utterly, utterly awful. Just crap. And it doesn’t sync to runkeeper in Chrome. Basically, it’s fancy garbage as far as I’m concerned. Which is too bad, because I like the idea of a waterproof watch instead of dragging my phone around. But I think I’ll go back to that.
Then on Sunday morning I went with BB and my sponsor and we ran a 10K. It was a great race put together by an ECC running store, winding through neighborhoods of the city I’d never been in. It was a circuitous route, sometimes on streets a little too narrow for the volume of runners (about 4000, I think). I’m very pleased with my result. This was my first ever 10K race. And while we weren’t planning to really push, we ended up going for a good pace and being pleased with the result.
BB and I ran together as always, and finished the race in 56:23. That works out to a 9:05 pace. That’s kinda cool because 9:08 is what you have to run to finish a half-marathon in under two hours. And 10K is pretty close to half a half-marathon. So, cooler weather, straighter course, there’s a decent chance we could actually pull off a sub-2 half. And while I won’t cry if I never make that, it’d be pretty cool.
Overall, I finished just in the lower half of men, overall, and just in the lower half of men in my age group (40-44). I could not be happier with that. I finished about smack-dab in the middle of a large group of men who run six-mile races for fun. I’m mediocre. And I am damned proud of being mediocre.
I mean that absolutely sincerely. I have gone from being a fat, lazy, alcoholic smoker to someone who displays basic quality in a footrace among men who run. As my addictions and obesity fade in my visceral memory, it is crucial to me that I remain in a place, mentally and spiritually, committed to making progress. That’s how I safeguard my sobriety. I may not remember so well anymore how cravings feel. It can be easy to forget the shame and fear and self-hatred and drudgery. But I still know keenly that if I don’t maintain my spiritual condition, I will return to that.
Being a runner has given me a place to run to. I know what forward means, now. I have learned to make progress not only in my sobriety, as I started learning more than seven years ago. Now I am learning to make progress is all the aspects of my life. Career, relationship, fitness. In so many ways I am delayed in life. I went through puberty late. I started my career late. I got married late, and divorced quickly. Now I am finally settling in to a life worth living.
Being mediocre, middle-of-the-road, is an aspirational goal for many alcoholics. I don’t need to excel. I don’t need to surpass. I don’t need to be the best or the smartest or the greatest at anything. I just want to have a simple life where I contribute and succeed at basic measures of decency. Where I’m true to myself and committed to my path. I have a path to follow now. I don’t know exactly where it goes. But I’m running.
Fitness Dilemma.
A friend of mine is signing up to do a half Ironman. For the past few months, I’ve been thinking more and more about doing that. For those who aren’t familiar, a half Ironman is a triathlon consisting of a 1.2 mile swim, a 56 mile bike ride, and a 13.1 mile run. It sounds hard, and I have no doubt it would test me to my ultimate. I would go in with no time goals other than the ones imposed on me by the race organizers (Finish the swim by 1:10, finish the bike+swim by 5:30, finish the race by 8:30).
I’ve never done a triathlon and I’m not really sure I truly want to. For me, the bike is the big push. I’m comfortable in the water and can swim a long way, albeit slowly. I can run, well, so far I know I can run 16.1 miles without stopping. The bike is a different animal for me. Lately I’ve been biking more, and I’ve gone as far as 21 miles in about 90 minutes. That translates to 56 miles in four hours, if I can keep the pace up. I could probably finish. If I trained right.
For me, the biggest issue isn’t the fitness attempt. I’d like to try that, I think. It would be exhausting and astonishing and I’d be really really amazed with myself if I did it, and I like feeling like that. No, for me, the biggest issue is that in the past two years, all of my fitness goals have coincided with running side by side with BB. And BB is not interested in doing a triathlon.
Now, don’t get me wrong. We’re allowed to have individual goals and personal ambitions. Obviously. No question about it. But I like running with her, and racing with her, and achieving together. That’s far beyond a fitness goal: it’s a relationship goal. We ran a 5K separately last year (same race, different paces), and if felt awful to both of us. We like achieving our fitness ambitions together.
Case in point: when I wanted to extend to a marathon, and BB wanted to run the half marathon faster first, we agreed to train for a faster half, and then extend to a full. Even though we had different goals, we pursued them together and are achieving them together. I like that. It’s important to me. I don’t want to separate our fitness goals because doing these things together is a cornerstone of our intimacy.
I also enjoy pushing myself and finding out what I can do. And a half Ironman would be a really ambitious push. I know I would feel a huge sense of accomplishment from it. So I don’t know what I’m going to do. A lot of conversation needs to happen. But I know I won’t feel right about abandoning relationship goals for personal ones. That doesn’t sit right with me at all. Nevertheless, I want to find out what I can do in new arenas. So I will ponder about it. And talk about it. And see how it sits in my heart.
I don’t have to decide anytime soon.
Unsupportable Anxiety.
I’ve been talking with a friend in the program a lot lately about anxiety. Like me, my friend suffers from anxiety that seems focusless and unrooted. It lingers in the air around us and seems to inveigle itself into whatever local phenomena we’re currently preoccupied with and become an entrenched participant. In my case, my house, the stock market, my job. Anxiety about all of it is constant, but I manage to keep it at bay with tools from the program and with exercise.
Today I have a couple of anxiety-producing activities. I have my annual review (which will determine my raise this year, though I feel pretty confident it will be between 2.9%-3.4% and where it falls in that range is not materially impactful). And I have a phone call with a lab director at the big fancy medschool I’m interviewing with for a professorship I probably don’t want. I’m very nervous about both.
And so let’s look at that: why am I nervous? There’s really nothing at stake in either case. My department is very good about annual reviews. Nothing is a surprise. If there were a problem with my performance, I would know it by now. I’ve been highly praised at every turn. There is simply no chance that I’ll be given a bad mark. I may not get what I’m hoping for, but I won’t be admonished for poor performance. And if I go in to the review looking for ways to improve, I’ll take any criticisms in stride.
The interview with the lab director is similar. This is someone who does systems research on a topic that interests me. A topic I’ve contributed to in the literature. I will have interesting things to say, and a lot to learn. There’s not really anything at stake. If I make an ass of myself, well, I don’t get a job I probably don’t want anyway. That’s not a real problem. I want them to want me, but I don’t think I’m in a position to change employers unless they offer me something truly magnificent.
Really, what I kind of want is to be able to look my employer in the eye and say, “One of the world’s most prestigious medical colleges just offered me a job being a professor. I’d like to make sure that if I tell them no, we have the same vision for what I expect out of my career here at MECMC.” And then use that leverage to build my vision here.
So, I get anxious about things very easily, in a miasmic, nebulous kind of way that interferes with my abilities to focus and function. So I work my program at it. And I exercise. And I try to make tangible progress on my career and relationship and life. And counting all those tangible things makes a positive impact on my psyche. And I can learn to relax. A little.
Sixteen Miles.
This Saturday, BB and I ran a sixteen miler. It was a glorious day. We headed out a little after 7 am, and kept up a jogging pace. It was about 65 degF, and not too humid. A nice light breeze from time to time. My neuroma didn’t bug me too much… just a “bunched sock” kind of sticky feeling, not any “funny bone” kind of zaps. I can tolerate that. We’ve made some improvements to how we do long runs, that have really helped my endurance.
We carry a lot of water. I use the CamelBak marathoner. It holds 2L of water, and if it’s going to be hot or humid (or both) I stick a bottle of Gatorade in one of the pockets too. Water is crucial for long runs. Before, I used to have this weird, stupid bravado about running without water. That’s possible for me up to about 8 miles in decent weather, but the distances I’m running now, and the heat and humidity I have to run in to train for a fall marathon, require me to drink on the run. And I don’t know quite why I ever thought badly of it. Proper hydration allows me to run further and more comfortably, which is my goal.
We carry a lot of calories. On this sixteen miler, I ate two peanut butter Powerbars (260 kcal each) and half a strip of Cliff’s shot bloks (100 kcal). This being after a breakfast of coffee and granola that was probably worth 300 kcal. So, in total, I had almost 1000 kcal before and during the run, which my GPS estimated at 2311 kcal. Of note, there, is the kind of calories you burn. Some people put on weight during marathon training because they think they can eat anything because of all the calories they burn. But it’s a lot easier to EAT 2000 kcal than to RUN 2000 kcal. I have to be careful this way. I will easily delude myself into thinking I can eat way more than I should.
Body Glide. Chafing is a major problem for me if I’m not careful. My nipples used to get it, but I discovered a good fabric for my shirts, and that wearing them a little tighter and giving up on modesty and self-shame about my body allows me to avoid the upper body chafing. But I will chafe at the thigh without a significant slathering of Body Glide. And we are now getting into distances where I’m going to need to stop and reapply.
Salt. I sweat a lot, and it’s very salty sweat. I get little salt crusts on the zippers of my arm bands and things like that. Losing electrolytes will really screw with your performance and how you feel. So we’ve started carrying a little Ziploc baggie of salt with us. I’m considering looking into a salt tablet of some kind. I also like the shot bloks that have extra sodium in them. Being able to keep going long distances when you sweat like I do requires attention to electrolytes, because hyponatremia sucks a lot and can be fatal.
So I’ve discovered that running long distances requires a lot more planning and thinking and equipment that I expected. It seems like you ought to be able to just go out and run and run and run. But when I try to do that, I’m limited by about 10 miles and I feel like hell at the end. This weekend, doing things right, I felt pretty good at the end of 16 miles. It took us nearly three hours. We weren’t breaking any speed records. But we ran and ran and ran, and I’m really happy with the result.
In the Empire Business.
I need to learn to cook meth, I guess. If you don’t get that, go watch all 45 hours of Breaking Bad. It’s a show which is almost but not quite as good as all the hype about it.
I am slowly now building my empire at MECMC. Currently, my empire consists of a single cubicle on the first basement level of the main hospital. One day, maybe, I’ll have an office in one of our glittering towers. A man can dream. But as of today, my tiny little empire is set to grow. Here’s how I did it:
1) I was lucky enough to find a hospital that was willing to invest in what I do. What I do is fairly rare, and is usually only done, when done at all, by academics and their students. It’s vanishingly rare to find people doing this professionally at hospitals, as part of the operations group. But because I had demonstrated success, MECMC – always a forward-thinking organization – decided to take a risk.
2) I started working at the tasks assigned, and rapidly demonstrated that I don’t suck at the job they hired me to do. This was because I’m pretty good at what I do, and also because I managed their expectations well. Don’t over-promise. Don’t under-promise and then way outperform your predictions. Do what you say you can do, ideally on a slightly faster timeline than you said represents a normal workload.
3) I stretched the vision for what my department could offer the hospital. Not only in terms of bringing a new skill set they hadn’t had before, but in terms of our output venues. In the two and a half years I’ve had this job, I’ve published four manuscripts on our work, and two others that I did for fun. I also have won close to $20,000 in small grants and awards, which is a first for my department. (And tells you how little money it takes to do what I do when salary isn’t attached.)
4) After a year and a half in my job, I wrote myself a promotion. I didn’t ask permission. I just did it when my manager asked me to update my job description to take my unique responsibilities into account. I made it clear that I knew I was delivering a lot of value, and I expected to be rewarded in kind. It was kind of a ballsy move. But it worked.
5) I proposed a new concept for what I expect out of my career. Working with my manager, department head, and senior VP, I outlined a growth plan for 5 years, and put in benchmarks for what I expected to achieve during that time, and the points along that timeline where I wanted increases in support from the hospital.
6) I spoke a lot at internal venues, to make sure there’s steady demand for my services. Operations planning committees, the COO’s briefing, etc.. And I made sure that when other people were talking about their projects I’d assisted on, that I gave them any support they needed including slides of my work. This meant that my contributions were often mentioned in public.
7) Once I had buy-in from my chain of command, and the COO, I wrote an entry-level position for an employee to report to me. I got that approved through a several-months-long administrative process, and now it’s live. I will hire a candidate ASAP.
I’ll spend a year training this person, working with them, and then publishing with them. It will allow me to get more work done, and I’ll hopefully be able to demonstrate that I’m a capable manager. To make sure that I can do that, I’m taking a 6 month internal management excellence class.
That will take me to the next phase, which is my last phase for this career stage. A directorship of my own lab. Within two years, I anticipate being able to ask for better space, an office instead of a cube, another promotion which involves a better title, and the opportunity to hire at the PhD level.
I don’t have any idea how other people build careers. This is how I’m building mine. In the absense of a defined career-ladder for my field and position, I’m making my own. By making it clear that I can deliver what I promise, and then letting my administration know that as I increase my value, I expect to have my authority, standing, influence, and compensation increase as well. And for now, it’s working.
Infactorium 